Nicola Griffith - Always

Dornan emerged, holding two cups of coffee. He held one out wordlessly.

I took it. It had cream in it. “I can’t drink this.”

“Why not?”

“It has cream in it.”

“Ah. Not because you’re pissed off at me? You were pretty pissed off earlier. And you pissed me off, actually, which is why, well, why I might have let you take away a false impression.”

“False?”

“You pissed me off. You’re always—Well. There it is, yes: false. Though we did go for a walk, and we did talk a lot, and I do like her very much. But it’ll never go further than friendship. Though friendship, I’ve heard, can go a long way, with the right wind.”

False.

“Do you want to know what we talked about half the bloody night, with the sea soughing gently and the moon out almost full?”

“I don’t know.”

“You.” He sighed. “Move up a bit.” He leaned back against the hood, too, and sipped his coffee. We both turned our faces to the sun. “She’s a fine woman.”

“She is.”

“And she’s very—Oh, stop clutching that coffee as though it’s your long-lost puppy. Looking pathetic doesn’t suit you. If you’re not going to drink it, put it down, for heaven’s sake.”

I set it carefully on the gravel. “You talked about me?”

“Among other things.” His eyes were distant for a moment. “She’s very fond of you.”

“Me, too, her.”

“I’m glad to hear it. She’s not… That is, she needs… Ah, well. What she needs is her business.”

“Yes.” Hers and mine. He wasn’t the one she had fed. He wasn’t the one who had seen her eyes go black and run a hand down her naked spine. I started to smile.

“You look particularly fatuous when you do that.”

He sounded petulant and it suddenly occurred to me how he might be feeling. “Are you all right?”

“All right? Why wouldn’t I be?”

I didn’t say anything.

He sighed. “I like her, and I think it could have been fine between us, but… Well, just but. It’s like a jigsaw piece that doesn’t quite fit. We could hammer it in and call it good, but the pattern would be wrong. I live in Atlanta, for one thing.”

“As do I.”

“So you do.” He could sound very much like my mother sometimes when he used that I know things you don’t tone. “But, Aud, the pattern is very nearly right, very nearly. She means a lot to me. Don’t toy with her.”

Silence. “So. Is she in there?”

“No. But—”

“Do you have her cell phone number?”

“She doesn’t carry one—” He knew so much more about her than I did. Because I asked nicely. “…me finish, she’s not on the set, but she is here.”

“Where?”

He nodded at the second Hippoworks trailer, just as the door banged open and she jumped down. She wore jeans and work boots and a salmon tank top. The arms of a cardigan were tied around her waist. Her skin was golden. From here you couldn’t see the freckles on her shoulders. She said to Dornan, “Floozy and the Winkle aren’t—” And then saw me. “Aud.”

Her hair was down. I wanted to plunge my hands in it, pull her to me.

“Well,” said Dornan. “I should be getting back in to help with that scaffolding. ”

Kick and I just looked at each other.

“It’s still hot in there,” he said to her. “Maybe you should stay out here for a bit.”

She nodded.

“Pass your cup, then,” he said to me. I bent and retrieved it, handed it over obediently. He sighed, shook his head, and went inside.

“It’ll be hot in there for a while,” I said.

“Okay.”

“We could go for a walk.”

“What, in traffic?”

“Not exactly.”

THE POCKETpark was on the other side of a deserted side road and hidden by a row of straggling hawthorn. If I hadn’t known it was there, I would never have found it.

There was a patch of grass and two benches overlooking the Duwamish, connected by a short path to a grassy clearing. We held hands and sat on a bench, watching the river slide by below, as brown as overbrewed tea. I felt my lack of sleep the night before, and if the wind hadn’t been so strong, I might have dozed. Every now and again the water glinted, like a powdered old lady throwing a roguish smile.

The rocky shore was green-slimed and smelled of rot. Northward, in the direction of Harbor Island, four Canada geese stood splay-footed on the pebbles and honked. Beyond them arced the concrete spans of a massive bridge.

“What’s the bridge?” I asked Kick, stroking the back of her hand idly with my thumb.

“The West Seattle Bridge. And, funnily enough, what it’s connecting to is West Seattle. Typical of this city.”

“Dornan finds all the names in this city amusing.”

“Um.” She sounded relaxed, or maybe she was just sleepy.

“I hear you two were up late last night, talking on the beach.” She was staring out over the water. “So. What was so interesting that it kept you up until two in the morning?”

She turned to look at me, and searched my face the way my mother had done just a week ago. “Oh, this and that.” And she laughed, and kissed my cheek. I put my arm around her.

Gulls wheeling over the old, crumbling pilings that poked like broken teeth from the low water on the shore of Kellogg Island squabbled over something I couldn’t see. Power lines ran here and there, and steam, white as the smoke in a movie magic spell, coiled up from a plant on Harbor Island. The clouds in the west looked like yellowed Styrofoam.

“There’s nothing like this in Norway,” I said.

“Um.” She settled tighter against me. In this light, her hair was like twisted gold wire. I would have been happy never to move again.

A tug plowed by, heading south, upriver, tight and rolling and muscular, cocky as a rooster. Its engine throbbed but the stink of diesel was whipped away by the breeze. Silver flashed in its wake. Salmon.

In the other direction, downriver, near the geese, more movement made me turn.

“Look,” I said, and she lifted her head.

A green-backed heron came in to land, like an inexpertly piloted Cessna. She sat up. “If a stunter dived that badly she’d be fired.”

“Not as graceful as you,” I agreed. “I watched Tantalus. ”

“That old thing?” But she sounded pleased.

“You dive like a cormorant.”

She smiled but didn’t say anything. The wind began to pick up. Another heron slipped and slid through the air and splashed tail- and feetfirst into the shallows right in front of me. It plunged its ugly, ancient-looking beak into the opaque water but missed whatever it had been after. Disgusted, it took off again, flapped heroically for a moment, and finally hauled itself into the air, legs dangling.

“I had no idea they were so clumsy. And small. It was a heron, right? I always thought they were bigger.”

“Great blue herons are big.”

“And what’s that?” She pointed.

“A grebe, I don’t know what kind.” And then I was seeing wildlife everywhere, and naming it for her: a kingfisher, some kind of coot, more fish, a bumblebee humming over the mossy grass, a ladybug snicking its wings in and out as it crawled across the back of the bench. I knew that the shallows would creep with crabs and be bobbled with oysters, that the smell of rot meant that living things grew here and then died. And I knew why people would pay a million dollars for a condo in an industrial district.

Kick slid close again, laid her palm against my cheek. Small, cool hands. I turned. Her eyes were very grey. She leaned in and kissed me. “Sometimes your face looks like something carved a thousand years ago.”

I ran my hands over her shoulders, down her arms, around her waist. The muscles in my thighs and back strained and trembled. She was shaking, too, but although her pupils were big, I realized it was with cold as much as desire. I untied the cardigan knotted around her hips, lifted her with one arm, and pulled the cardigan free with the other. I breathed fast. “Put this on,” I said.